I spent last evening playing and after dinner they came over and said "Games! Games!" and pointed at the screen. I asked what kind of games they wanted to play. "Racecars!" So I went hunting through the Fedora package repository and installed the extremetuxracer package as a "it's the first thing I could find that's close to racing cars and still has a reasonable download time over mobile broadband" pick.

We definitely did not play Tuxracer as intended. Luke decided to mash the right arrow key, and Julian crawled onto my knee and shouted navigation instructions ("FISH! FISH! TREE!") while I manned the left arrow key slightly more strategically to keep us from sliding in circles all the time. I soon realized that they didn't actually want to race - they wanted to make the penguin crash into things, and every time Tux hit a tree, a wall, or did a giant jump and belly flop, both boys would shout "OUCH!" and laugh. I think they were even disappointed every time we reached the finish line and I needed to restart the race so they could crash into things again.

After some time of hollering and laughing and giggling at the penguin, their mom called them to bed, which they only obeyed when I turned off my laptop. They ran into their room and stood on the higher bed - the beds are next to each other - flapping their arms and giggling madly, then jumping to land on their stomachs on the lower bed, making the same sounds effects they'd made when we were playing Tuxracer.

Two toddlers pretending to be the Linux mascot. It completely made my day. Their dad wants to install the game now, so I'm going to make them a livecd with childrens' games for Christmas since the family computers don't have Linux on them and can't (yet) be easily switched from Windows or OSX without disrupting work. Whee!